We spoke to James Sancto, CEO of We Make Change. He talks us through how the team built a network of ChangeMakers, connecting skilled people with social enterprises across the world. Listen on to find out how a simple concept has gone on to change the lives of many communities by using volunteer time effectively.
Hosted by Yiuwin Tsang from the Beautiful Business community team.
We spoke to James Sancto, CEO of We Make Change. He talks us through how the team built a network of ChangeMakers, connecting skilled people with social enterprises across the world. Listen on to find out how a simple concept has gone on to change the lives of many communities by using volunteer time effectively.
Hosted by Yiuwin Tsang from the Beautiful Business community team.
Hello, and welcome to the Beautiful Business podcast. Beautiful Business is a community for leaders who believe there's a better way of doing business. We believe beautiful businesses are led with purpose by people who care, guided by a clear strategy, and soulfully grown. I'm your host, Yiuwin Tsang. And I'm very lucky and grateful to have the chance to chat with James Sancto in this session, James is the CEO and co-founder of We Make Change. We Make Change, connect, skilled volunteers online with social enterprises across the world to enable anyone, anywhere to use their skills, to support the causes they care about. Since launching We Make Change now supports a global movement of 25,000 change makers, 700 social enterprises and 10 companies in over 100 countries. So, James when we say supporting local communities. What does that mean to you?
James Sancto:I think to most people, communities are geographic. So they think of local as in those people and communities that are close to them. But, in an increasingly globalised world, where actually we're sometimes more connected to people halfway across the world than we are to our next door neighbour. I tend to think of communities more generally as they can be communities that are locally, geographically, but they can also be communities of interest. And those communities can be interests as diverse as you know, sports is one of the key ones, you know, art amongst other things. Even things like gaming as well. But for me, one of the biggest and most powerful areas of communities are cause based communities. So, people that care about climate change, wherever they are in the world, have a common cause that they share regardless of the geographical boundaries that split them. And so when I think about local communities, whether it's in business or personally, it's about identifying and linking yourself and your organisation to those causes that you personally and organisationally most care about.
Yiuwin Tsang:It's so interesting, isn't it? I fully agree with you and to your point about having these kinds of commonalities and the common threads, and I think communities, it's really a reflection of what the connections that humans have, right, as people. And as I say, if they can kind of coalesce around different interests, different causes, different values and things like that. But an interesting point that you just said that about how there's been this atomisation of communities driven perhaps by digital and internet and connectivity and things like this that means that communities don't have to just be in a localized area. It can be spread right around the world, which I think is a wonderful thing, but at the same time, it can also paradoxically isolate people as well. Are we in danger perhaps of ignoring is perhaps too strong a word, but and even is neglecting, but do we sometimes overlook our local community or do you feel that there's sometimes a danger of that happening?
James Sancto:I think absolutely. From someone who grew up in a relatively rural village where you'd walk down the street and everyone would say hello to you, then you go into the big city and then suddenly no one seems to say hello to anyone apart from those that they're intimately aware of and, you know, have deep friendship connections with. I think one of the biggest issues that to some extent is a root of many issues that we face in society. Is that sense of a lack of connection to people within our local vicinity. And again, it can be a smaller thing is literally saying hi to someone on the street to show a degree of familiarity and politeness. But in addition to that, I think it's also about caring about some of those causes that are also very local to you. And those can be issues which are faced by yourself as well as your neighbours and you know, people in the local area. And I think particularly in a world where, as someone relatively young, who's grown up in a political environment, which is very much polarised and also focused on very big issues. It almost makes it seem as though we're powerless to change anything, whether that be on a global level when addressing issues like climate change or whether that'd be on a local level and ensuring that people can access everything they need, whether it be healthcare or, or food or anything else. And I think one of the reasons that we also face so many of these big global challenges is because we are not addressing some of the key social, environmental considerations locally as well. I think there are a whole range of reasons for that, which we could go into, but I think that's a really, truly is at the root cause of so many challenges that we do face and with people being increasingly mobile as well, that degree of atomisation and sense of not really having a place can make it even harder for people to overcome that and also be part of the solution as well.
Yiuwin Tsang:That's such an eloquent way of putting it. I think that's absolutely right. The sense of belonging and I think it's such a powerful one. When I went on honeymoon with my other half, and we went to Bali and a lot of the people that were local there, they have intergenerational living in houses and that sense of community, that bond is so strong you can almost sense the contentment that they have as a life, as a population in society and it holds up a bit of a mirror, as you say to, as a society that we're more used to over in the west in the sense that, you know, with all the political turmoil with a polarisation of opinions, it's quite difficult to feel a sense of belonging in that you're either with us or you're against us in many senses and that polarisation doesn't do anything for that cohesiveness of a local community. Whereas as you say, with those simple things, the acknowledgement that hello, those connections that you make as you're walking around the street and the people that you might see at the school pickups and things like this. The little things which almost got to transcend that political positioning of these sorts of things. It doesn't matter what your political colors are and if you're helping people that are in need, if you're doing something good for the community. So it's both. Whereas I feel like we almost lose sight of it sometimes. with the social media age, and the digital age of all the benefits that the internet and its connectivity have brought it's also brought such profound problems I feel as well.
James Sancto:Yeah, totally. And I think that's the great paradox of the age we live in is that we have all of the skills, resources, and technology that we need to address the challenges the world faces today. But what is preventing us from addressing them or frankly, even making some of these challenges even harder to address than they already are. Is this sense that there is a true disconnect between people and place and people and purpose and people, and opportunity to actually enable either to be enabled themselves, to be part of the solution, or to actually find some of the solutions that are there to help address some of the challenges that they might face personally as well. And that is the true paradox of our age and almost the greatest irony of again our globalised society.
Yiuwin Tsang:It's, it really grinds my gears. And I often think this a lot that, you know, some of the brightest minds of the world and instead of trying to solve world hunger, climate change peace, all these kinds of things, all these huge problems that are facing us as a species they're being leveraged to generate clicks, you know, and generate money or shareholder value. And that in itself is really upsetting when you spend too much time thinking about it. I want to move on perhaps a little bit more kind of upbeat, but tell us a little bit more about what you do at We Make Change and how you enable people who have the will to make change and to make a difference and what you did to help them do that.
James Sancto:Sure. So at We Make Change we connect skilled volunteers with social enterprises, changing the world. And the way that we do that is that we enable individual volunteers to go onto our platform. They can identify the causes they care about skills they've got and time they can give, and they can find projects run by social enterprises, addressing every challenge you can think of everything from climate change to reducing inequality and everything in between and volunteer their skills online to truly make an impact. And we also enable corporate professionals to volunteer their skills, to support those social enterprises through our Change Day, online volunteering events, which give companies an opportunity to provide their employees with the chance to utilise their skills, to address the challenges that the world faces today by really supporting inspiring social entrepreneurs with scalable solutions to some of these challenges. And one of the reasons that we even started was because there were so many people who I came across as then a younger professional who wanted to use their skills for good, but didn't know how they could and on the other side, you've got these organisations with amazing solutions to these challenges who find it so hard to find those people with the skills that they need to grow their impact. And by connecting the two, so bridging that disconnect or we're able to enable those individuals to make the change they want to see and enable those social enterprises to grow and scale their impact towards those causes as well.
Yiuwin Tsang:That's pretty cool, James, that's like proper superhero stuff. I guess one of the, one of the big challenges that social enterprise and not-for-profits have is around that financial sustainability part of it. One of the challenges that they face when they have the financial sustainability challenge over them as well is around people, is around skills and bringing people in from that start. So I guess what We Make Change does is it helps, as you say, bridge that divide, it helps enable and skills and capability to come in to these social enterprises where perhaps you might struggle to bring that type of capability in. And we'll talk a little bit more about the individual side. And then let's talk a little bit about the corporate side as well because I'm really fascinated to know. What do you see when you see people that have got professional skills, you mentioned yourself as a young professional. What do you see drives them in terms of their motivations, in order to help social enterprises. Talk us through the typical kind of people and what gets them over that inertia that we all have where we decide, oh, I would like to do something, but I don't have time.
James Sancto:Absolutely. Well, a lot of this comes from my own personal experience because I was in that position where I wanted to use my skills for good, but found it so hard to find an opportunity that supports the causes that I really care about, uses the skills that I have and I'm looking to develop and also fits with my schedule. And for most people - so to give you a stat: 90% of people want to volunteer, but only 25% actually do. And what are those divides? One of the biggest is a lack of opportunity or lack of being able to see the opportunities where they can use their skills, support their causes within the schedule that they have. So part of getting over that inertia is no longer the fact that do people actually want to volunteer or not. They really do. Almost everyone, which seems crazy because a few years ago that certainly wasn't the case. Now the inertia is, well, actually, how can I do it? And for a generation of people who are globally connected, often highly educated in different ways, in different skills and in different formats. We all do have time. But often it's how can we use it? So the idea behind We Make Change was to provide people with volunteering opportunities that are quite outside the traditional type of volunteering, which is typically inaccessible, has to be done in a physical location. It's often very inflexible has to be done within specific hours and finally it's often very low skilled, so it doesn't actually use your professional skills. So the idea behind We Make Change is to enable people to use their professional skills, whether that be graphic design, marketing, writing, research, or anything else. And be able to use those skills with anything from two to four to eight hours a week to support social enterprises as well. So even though those individuals might think of themselves as, as relatively time poor, they are very skill rich. So the idea is that if you can provide people with the opportunity to use those skills in a very short amount of time and super flexibly, so it's all online, you can do it almost whenever you want to. And again, it's using your actual skills. You can help people overcome that sense of inertia. And again, because we're globally connected, those opportunities can be anywhere in the world with social enterprise anywhere. And those individuals can be anywhere in the world too.
Yiuwin Tsang:Interesting so that's a really, really cool James. An old client I used to work with as well used to talk about leveraging, leveraging time. And to your point about a lot of volunteering opportunities in the traditional kind of sense, people will be familiar with of... we'll go and paint a room, you know, in one of the locations or we'll do a litter pick or something along those lines, all perfectly honorable, positive things to do, but as you say, but relatively low skilled, it is just a time thing. I spend one day cleaning up the beach. It's just one day's worth of stuff to come out. Whereas, on a marketing perspective, if we were able to create a campaign or reach a thousand people, with that time, then it's just how well we've leveraged our time. And it sounds like the We Make Change model allows for this type of leveraging of skills that would otherwise be lost because as I say, the other interesting part that comes off this, I imagine is going to be the degree of impact it comes back to leveraging doesn't it, as you say, and putting new lick of paint onto a room, one of the locations for charity might make it look nice, but that's almost as far as the impact will go whereas I imagine where volunteers can leverage the skills that they have, the impact is quite profound comparatively.
James Sancto:Yeah. Oh, totally. I'll give you two opposing models of impact. So again, like you say, that traditional sort of volunteering that particularly lots of corporates do you know, it has its place and of course, it can be absolutely great and it can also fit what organisations want to do and what works for them. But to give you an idea about how big of the difference the impact can be is if you're a company, you know, and you've got a, let's just say, 20 employees who are going to go around and paint a school. It's like, okay, well, that school could buy in contractors to do that, a few hundred pounds plus, in order to get those people into to do that. Now, a team of 20 employees that many companies, the amount of value that they can add to a social enterprise through the work that they do is multiple. I'm talking 10 times plus the value that they can provide through painting a school. And that comes in two ways. Firstly it's because of how much a social enterprise would actually pay for those skills, if they could afford to is part of the value. But the additional value is that those social enterprises, which I use as a term to include non-profits and also for profit businesses, but all focused on making social impact is that they can leverage those skills to use your term, to multiply their own impact. Because if you're working on a marketing strategy that could help them to reach thousands of new people, multiply their audience, which can enable them such a great impact and also scale ultimately their solution at the same time as well. So you go from having children who might now be in a nicely painted school to thousands, tens of thousands of users who now might have access to an app that's helping young people find educational materials for no cost, but now has the opportunity to grow even further. So the value that those individual employees can provide is in that social impact, but ultimately, personally, they also get the sense of accomplishment because they themselves have had this multiplication of their own impact, literally through a few hours of their time.
Yiuwin Tsang:It's fabulous. And it's really good. And I imagine again, with people on an individual level work with, on the volunteer side, the reward, the satisfaction of seeing your time, your effort and the impact that it has must be again a big driver and it must be a positive side to it.
James Sancto:Absolutely. The main reason people volunteer is to make impact.
Yiuwin Tsang:Yeah.
James Sancto:As crazy as that sounds to some people, it genuinely is why most people do it. Okay. Additional benefits are it can help to develop your skills. It can help to improve your CV. And also it can help to build your network. But ultimately the key motivation comes because people want to make impact. And that's partly because for so many people in their day-to-day jobs, they don't feel that sense of purpose that they're really driving for through the work that they do. So if on the side of their day-to-day job, which pays the bills, they can volunteer and have that sense of purpose that's really driving the way to some extent they can get the best of both of those worlds.
Yiuwin Tsang:That leads us really nicely on to the corporate side of things cause I think the world of work has changed how our relationship with people has changed with work and what we do in the concept of work and I don't think this is shot in the dark or unexpected change. I think there's been a generational shift in terms of this kind of relationship and economies. Generally, it kind of matured and moved on from where we were 20 years ago, 30 years, but 50 years ago. So our relationship with work has changed massively and with that a worker's agreement with employers. And now, and certainly previously, when people ask what were the main motivators of staying in a job or moving to a job, money, and renumeration has just been sliding further and further down that scale and going further and further up is an alignment of values and alignment of purpose and part of that and how an organisation can express its purpose, can express its values is through the work that it does and the organisations that it might help and I guess where some organisations might find a challenging might be, perhaps, they don't have a purpose or impact output as an organisation. And so there has to be other ways that we can express that and I imagine this is another key benefit from the We Make Change model.
James Sancto:Yeah. Well, when I was at business school, I was told that the purpose of business was to maximize shareholder wealth. It wasn't a theory. It wasn't a hypothesis. It was fact. And as you can imagine, someone just going to university, you take it as fact. It seems strange, but, okay. That's what they tell you. It's written in the textbooks. People much cleverer than you who have been cited far more times, believe it to be true. But then when I came to graduating and went through the process of learning about a whole bunch of things outside of business, I started to realise that actually that is a philosophy. Business could exist to maximize shareholder wealth and some businesses do. Now, increasingly to your point, more businesses are focusing, well actually, what is that purpose as an organisation and in this area one of the things which I think many businesses are struggling with is it's not only defining their sense of purpose because actually a lot of companies now have, you know, got their own, ESG or corporate social responsibility agendas, but it is how would you put that into practice? And for most companies that is not, their business is not impact, their business is making money. So one of the ideas behind what we do for corporates, it's about saying that you might have that incredible CSR agenda, or you might not, but you know that you as a business should have a sense of purpose and want to make impact, and you definitely know that your employees want to. So what we enable them to do is basically come to us and they tell us what causes they want support as a company or what causes their employees want to support sometimes different things. What skills their employees have, how many, the people they want to have engaged. And then we host these online volunteering events, which we call Change Days where those employees are matched in teams with a social enterprise where they can volunteer their skills online in literally just four hours to support those social enterprises with a specific challenge that they face. So that could be developing a marketing strategy for their next campaign. It could be help putting in place legal frameworks so that they can ensure that the legal foundations to grow their organisation. It can help support their founders through executive leadership and everything else. And the idea is that in just a few hours, you, as a company and the skills that your employees have can make a truly incredible impact but only if you give that opportunity to organisations like ourselves and others that know how you put that purpose truly into practice.
Yiuwin Tsang:Just conversation just the other day, actually, as I'm meeting with a board of trustees from a local charity, and that was one of the things that came up, I think was we were talking about impact and it just comes back to what we're talking about just earlier on James, about the difference between painting a room versus, the longer term impact. And I think this is a point, isn't it, it's around with these organisations that have got CSR I was part of their operations. They need to have a way of measuring it to make it meaningful beyond we spent five hours painting a walls or things like this and it sounds like these kinds of challenge days or these change day stories that you organise with them, We Make Change and it gives them an opportunity to do that. If anything, it almost translates quite neatly into more business, commercial vocabulary almost in many senses, it's taken the skills that you've got, which is already in a context that you understand and applying them in an impact environment.
James Sancto:Absolutely. And I think that's one of the key things that companies need to understand more is that it's about leveraging the skills of your employees is often the most impactful thing that you can do as a company. Of course, there are amazing organisations and companies out there with these huge foundations that can donate lots of money and that's also great and definitely needed. But the thing coming down to employees as well is that when you look at what employees really care about and want to do, is that it's through these types of initiatives that you can give employees the opportunity to be part of your sustainability agenda. Rather than just hearing about it. You can also give them the chance to develop their own skills because they're put in an environment which is totally different from the professional one, but they're still using those professional skills in a very different setting, which gives them the opportunity to use them and develop them in a very different way. Finally in addition to actually making some real impact is that it gives them an opportunity to engage together as a team. And when more people are working remotely than ever, it's incredible when you get people in a room who are focused on a very specific challenge, but also have that sense of purpose that they can really rally together and not only showcase their abilities, but showcase to their other colleagues, how much they also care about these issues and how much as a team together they can achieve in a very single day. It's super, super powerful. And honestly, I kind of wish we could just deliver these to everyone so that they could see the level of scale of impact that they can make. So I think we transform how people think about their own jobs, their daily lives, as well as what they might do on the side of that through volunteering or otherwise.
Yiuwin Tsang:Hearing you talk about it James it sounds like the business equivalent to a super foods, like blueberries and goji berries and stuff like this. When we talk about it in this context, it just feels like, and sounds like a no brainer. Yet, the reality is, as you say, in the context of a volunteer, 90% of us want to do it yet only 25% of us actually do it. So there's 65% opportunity gap there. Nearly two thirds on a personal level and I imagine there are similar numbers when we've taken it up to the corporate level, but I do wonder whether or not you see this as much if people come to you, they've already overcome that internal inertia again, but, do you feel that there's , almost like a commercial balance that needs to be achieved for businesses before they can realistically engage with organisations like We Make Change? Do you see there's almost like a tide mark that they need to overcome.
James Sancto:I think to some extent it's that type of thinking of, we must be commercially viable first, before we can think about purpose. That is the short-term thinking that's got many businesses, but also the world into the mess we're in. Because ultimately if you're a business now and you're not purpose led, you are going to be at a disadvantage, whether it be in terms of hiring employees, getting customers or growing your social media following to make it as basic as that and so many businesses now are starting to use purpose as the key driver for their commercial aspects. In many ways, that's ultimately what we do. We exist to make impact and we ourselves earn revenue because we enable companies to enable their employees to do so, too. So I think now the key thing is about, rather than thinking about profit versus purpose it's how can you leverage profit to fulfill your purpose. Flipping the script entirely, so that ultimately everything that you do, including your commercial viability is focused on what your purpose is as an organisation. And for many organisations that might be cause related or specific, some organisations have got very close links to particular things, whether it be supporting refugees or addressing environmental issues, or again, it might be leveraging your employees and their own desires to make a difference to actually identify what that purpose is ultimately going to be. But again, I think companies now more than ever seeing that purpose is ultimately their root to success, rather than something that they do on the side with the profit that they're otherwise making.
Yiuwin Tsang:That's really interesting and certainly the circles that we move in, certainly the clients we've been looking to work with, I think, fully aligned with what you're saying there. But I do still think it's a change and I think, as you say, the traditional sense of thinking, how people have been brought up in terms of education in terms of degrees, and as you say, companies and limited companies exist to drive value for shareholders. There is a shift in mentality that needs to happen, but it brings us right back to the beginning and we talk about connections and community and things that we coalesce around and we hold on to and you see how powerful that is from sports teams and bands and music tastes and all these things that where people come together and they're naturally brought together and these sorts of things and it's just logical when you look at it from a business perspective, you will naturally bring people to you even if it, as I say, if it's not an, a purpose output business, if you're a graphic design agency, if you're a coffee shop somewhere or whatever it might be but if you have your purpose at your core then you're going to naturally attract people from a customer base. And also from a, as you say, from an employee base that align with those purposes as well.
James Sancto:Yeah. And one stat they'll also throw at you, which I think is indicative of how there's also a disconnect between a sense of purpose the business has and also the reality of it is that only 14% of paid employee volunteering time is actually used. 14%, one four. So in other words, what we're saying is companies are providing employees with really, in some ways, incredible amounts of volunteering time. Often, two, three days, throughout a year for individuals to use their skills, but when so few people are using it, it's actually as a company, you should be thinking are we really living up to the purpose that we state. And of course in that other 86% of people not volunteering, there are a whole bunch of reasons, but often again, when the issues is not being provided with enough opportunities to do it, that fit within the confines of the schedule that those employees are often given and again, as a company, one of the things that you can do to your point is that ultimately a company is a community and it's a community of generally highly skilled individuals. The one thing is we don't typically think of them as communities because often they're brought together, not by a sense of purpose, but by a need to put food on the table. And if you really thought of your business as a community and as part of a broader community, whether that be in your local area or more broadly linked to some of the key purpose or causes that you are yourselves linked to, then you would start to think well actually, how can we ensure that a hundred percent of that volunteering time is used because ultimately as a community is good for our society as a whole. It's good for our employees. And ultimately it will be good for our bottom line. I don't like making the argument that it's good for your bottom line because it's literally the right thing to do. But I think in the words of Robert Kennedy, where he said that ultimately, it's economically advantageous, but it is the right thing to do. Sometimes you have to win the argument on both fronts to be able to make it happen.
Yiuwin Tsang:Thanks so much James Sancto from We Make Change for sharing your stories, your experiences, and your passion on how we can all be making a positive change in the world. Thank you for joining us for this week's beautiful Business podcast. Beautiful Business is a community for leaders who believe there's a better way to do business. Join us next time for more interesting discussions on how businesses can bring about change, helping communities building a fair society and safeguarding the planet. You can also join in the discussion@www.beautifulbusiness.uk